Stoke-on-Trent

Stoke-on-Trent is six towns that agreed to be one city and to set the world's table. The Potteries — Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, Longton, federated in 1910 — sat on coal and clay and turned them into civilisation's crockery: Wedgwood, Spode, Minton and Royal Doulton fired their wares here, bone china was perfected here, and the bottle kilns whose smoky forest once darkened the sky survive as listed monuments, brick udders of the industrial sublime. The museums keep the craft at world standard — the Wedgwood collection, the Gladstone Pottery's working kilns — and the ceramics industry, slimmed but skilled, still throws and glazes.

Arnold Bennett made the six towns five in his novels and put the Potteries into English literature; the city answered the twentieth century with oatcakes (the local delicacy, served from terrace-house windows), football of ancient pedigree, and a talent for producing entertainers. Its principal stage is the Regent Theatre in Hanley — the venue documented in the concert record — a restored 1929 picture palace whose gilded auditorium now receives touring opera, ballet, orchestras and musicals for the whole conurbation. Six towns, a thousand kilns, one stage in a cinema's gold: Stoke-on-Trent glazed the world and kept the matinée.